FaSTrack: a Modular Framework for Real-Time Motion Planning and Guaranteed Safe Tracking

Abstract

Real-time, guaranteed safe trajectory planning is vital for navigation in unknown environments. However, real-time navigation algorithms typically sacrifice robustness for computation speed. Alternatively, provably safe trajectory planning tends to be too computationally intensive for real-time replanning. We propose FaSTrack, Fast and Safe Tracking, a framework that achieves both real-time replanning and guaranteed safety. In this framework, real-time computation is achieved by allowing any trajectory planner to use a simplified \textit{planning model} of the system. The plan is tracked by the system, represented by a more realistic, higher-dimensional \textit{tracking model}. We precompute the tracking error bound (TEB) due to mismatch between the two models and due to external disturbances. We also obtain the corresponding tracking controller used to stay within the TEB. The precomputation does not require prior knowledge of the environment. We demonstrate FaSTrack using Hamilton-Jacobi reachability for precomputation and three different real-time trajectory planners with three different tracking-planning model pairs.

Published in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control

References in corpus (4)

• Robustness of Control Barrier Functions for Safety Critical Control
• FaSTrack: a Modular Framework for Fast and Guaranteed Safe Motion Planning
• Fast Reachable Set Approximations via State Decoupling Disturbances
• Optimization-Based Collision Avoidance

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